The Place

Salento, a middle ground, suspended between the Ionian Sea and the Adriatic Sea. The spaciousness of the sky, the unbridled sunshine, the vast horizons enhance the colors. More than 2000 square km of which 206 of coastal profile.
Galatina is a pearl set in the Salento peninsula, with its ancient village and its urban fabric characterized by houses of a vaguely oriental type and mainly eighteenth-century architecture, of exquisite artistic refinement. City of art since 2004, it tells an ancient story through churches, palaces and courts. It houses the Basilica of Santa Caterina d’Alessandria, one of the most important monuments of Apulian Romanesque art dating back to the fourteenth century.
Galatina is the symbol of Tarantism, which preserves the tradition of an ancient ritual.
12 km from the Ionian Sea and 20 km from the Adriatic Sea, is the ideal place for a study stay but also for fun.

The Cradle of Tarantismo

Tarantismo is defined as a historical-religious phenomenon that characterized southern Italy and in particular Puglia since the Middle Ages. It lived a happy period until the eighteenth century but in the following century a slow and inexorable decline led it to survive only in some areas of the Salento Peninsula.
St. Paul became the protector of the tarantati, the one who granted the grace to heal from the ancient bite of the taranta that poisons and from which one was freed with the help of music, dance and colors. On 29 June, on the occasion of the celebration of the feasts of St Peter and Paul, all the tarantati from all over Salento went to the city of Galatina at the chapel of the Apostle of the Gentiles to thank him for the healing that took place through home care. The bite of the taranta concerned mostly women, belonging to the peasant world. Those who were bitten fell into a state of depression and inertia, from whose torpor arose the sound of a music marked by the rhythm of tambourines and found relief only through a frenetic and obsessive dance, which then gave rise to the pinch. In the evenings of Salento it is normal to come across an evening of pizzica and it is difficult to resist the unbridled rhythm of this music that, to the rhythm of tambourines and dialectal nenie, characterizes this land. The pizzica has origins that sink their birth in the phenomenon of tarantismo.